Passport Files of 3 Candidates Were Improperly Viewed

WASHINGTON — The State Department said on Friday that it was investigating several incidents in which the passport files of all three presidential contenders were improperly accessed by employees.

The breaches involved electronic files that contained personal information about Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain. A State Department spokesman declined to say what was in those files, but he said they were likely to contain biographical information and passport applications.

Mr. Obama’s passport file was breached on three separate occasions earlier this year and as recently as last week, by three employees working for independent contractors who did not have authorization to access the information. The breaches occurred on Jan. 9, Feb. 21, and March 14, according to The Associated Press.

The State Department’s computer system had flagged each incident, but senior department officials were not informed until they looked into the matter, after receiving inquiries from a reporter on Thursday, a department spokesman said. “That information didn’t rise up to senior management levels,” the spokesman, Sean McCormack, said at a Friday news conference. “That should have happened.”

Two of the employees were fired, Mr. McCormack said. The Associated Press reported that they had worked for Stanley, Inc., a company that provides administrative support and services to government groups and is based in Arlington, Va. Stanley signed a five-year, $570 million contract with the State Department earlier this week to work on the department’s passport database.

The third employee also accessed Mr. McCain’s file, but was only reprimanded and remains employed.

Mr. McCormack speculated that “imprudent curiosity” had motivated the employees’ actions. “That is our initial take on the matter,” Mr. McCormack said in a hastily arranged conference call on Thursday night, after The Washington Times published a report about the incident involving Mr. Obama.

“We are not being dismissive of any other possibility,” Mr. McCormack quickly added. But at Friday’s news conference, he appeared to take umbrage at the suggestion that the breach was an instance of political foul play.

One reporter, Lambros Papantoniou of the Greek daily newspaper Eleftheros Typos, asked a question and noted in passing that “the whole story looks like a new Watergate scandal.”

Mr. McCormack interrupted. “You know what? You know what? That is so outrageous,” he said. “You just lost your privilege.” Mr. McCormack refused to acknowledge the reporter for the remainder of the news conference.

So far in their investigation, State Department officials have not found additional breaches of files belonging to the presidential candidates who are no longer running. “If they come across any other incidents, of course, they are going to report those,” Mr. McCormack said.

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Mrs. Clinton’s passport file was breached last summer during a training session for State Department employees. A trainee was encouraged to enter a family member’s name into the passport database for training purposes, Mr. McCormack said. Instead, the trainee entered Mrs. Clinton’s name. Mr. McCormack said the trainee was promptly admonished.

Earlier on Friday, before the breaches of the files of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain were disclosed, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, said she personally apologized to Mr. Obama. “I told him that I was sorry and I told him that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file,” she said.

Mr. McCormack, the spokesman, said that Ms. Rice also apologized to Mrs. Clinton, and was planning to speak to Mr. McCain later in the day.

In a statement issued by his campaign, Mr. McCain called on the government to respect its citizens’ privacy. “It appears that privacy was breached, and I expect a thorough review and a change in procedures as necessary to ensure the privacy of all passport files,” he said.

Mr. Obama, speaking to reporters in Oregon on Friday, said he appreciated Ms. Rice’s apology. But he called for the passport situation “to be investigated diligently and openly,” preferably by a Congressional committee “so that it is not simply an internal matter.”

“One of the things that the American people count on in their interactions with any level of government is that if they have to disclose personal information, that is going to stay personal and stay private,” Mr. Obama said. “And when you have not just one, but a series of attempts to tap into people’s personal records, that’s a problem, not just for me, but for how our government is functioning.”

Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement on Friday that his committee would also look into the breaches.

Mr. Berman compared the incidents to a similar breach in 1992 involving a State Department file on then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, which occurred amid rumors that Mr. Clinton had tried to renounce his citizenship to avoid the draft while he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford during the Vietnam War.

The 1992 incident, Mr. Berman said, “also was characterized as isolated and nonpolitical when the news initially emerged. This time, as then, Congress will pay close attention to the depth of executive branch involvement in the rifling of presidential candidates’ passport files.”